The banality of righteousness

Coming late to this: but Jo Walton (that's Jo Lindsay Walton, of course; not the other one) posted a fascinating piece on Banks, in part riffing of my Reversing Through The Culture blopposts.* Smart stuff, smartly put (I especially liked the idea of Excession as an epistolary novel); rather more smart and smartly put than my posts, actually, which some might consider rude. But there you go. One of my arguments was that Banksian ethics was a touch shallow, a sort of juvenile empathy-based 'you wouldn't like it if it happened to you' morality, as opposed to (say) the more complex and demanding kind of ethics theorised by Levinas (say). Walton replies:

Perhaps an awful lot of their ethics is reducible to empathy, but perhaps that empathy itself is actually quite a tricksy and multifarious and broad concept -- at least inasmuch as it accommodates berk empathy (or bathetic empathy). That is: empathy which doesn't involve much replication of affect, much harmony of hearts but an empathy which operates through a bureaucratic crankishness sometimes mistaken for evil's prerogative exclusively. The banality of righteousness.

I'm still thinking about that (say).

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*I'm thinking of petitioning to change the word 'blogposts',with that awkward pebble-in-mouth 'gp' middle phoneme, to the easier-to-say 'blopposts'. Could catch on? No? Oh well; suit yourself.

SF, Audience Cults and Hope

I've little to add to this, but wanted to reblog it here as food for thought. It's from Jason Horsley's Reality Sandwich blog:

The phrase "audience cult" was coined by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (self-identified "religious engineer") in their 1985 book, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. An audience cult is not a religion, nor is it a formal group whose members can be identified (either by one another or by themselves). And yet they can be identified-by shared interest. People who "believe in UFOs" as part of an extraterrestrial experimentation/hybridization program, for example, belong to an audience cult. People who believe in ancient astronauts from elsewhere, or in psychedelics as a tool for self-realization, in regular meditation and a vegan diet, astrology, runes, and Tarot, communicating with the dead, the power of occult rituals, and so on, all belong to one amorphous audience cult or another. These audience cults overlap with other audience cults, and membership to one does not prohibit membership to another. They also overlap with more overtly fantasy-based audience cults such as comic book fans, sci-fi fans, or "Trekkies," yet it's worth noting that the area of overlap is not as great as might be thought. Sci-fi fans are often quite skeptical or dismissive of "true believers," and vice versa. The reason may be found in the following, from The Future of Religion: "One very general but vague compensator is communicated through all audience cults: diffuse hope. If extraordinary things are possible, then one may hope for anything and everything. Audience cults proclaim the existence of cracks in the structure of the mundane world through which any imaginable marvel might suddenly appear. . . . If each audience cult projects a narrow ray of hope, then, together, audience cults project a broad if dim spectrum of hopes combining to form a vague impression of heaven. Thus, although each cult is far from being a religion, collectively, they communicate a pale reflection of the religious. . . . [A]udience cults are connected to a state of free-floating optimism-something less than true belief in the notions of the cults-the diffuse feeling that all things are possible but that nothing is certain to be true. . . . Rather than thrusting people into a storm-tossed sea of confusion without anchor or life raft, [this feeling] may compensate for an all too rigid, mundane life."

Christopher Priest, The Adjacent (2013)

Very highly recommended indeed; one of the books of the year.

Man of Steel (dir. Zack Snyder, 2013)

An intriguing take on the biopic format. Some of the details here are deictic -- for example, the logo worn on the costume of the Trotsky-character 'General Zod' is clearly a Soviet Era sickle:

But otherwise the film chooses to tell the life-story of Iosif Vissarionovich entirely in fictionalised form, opting (influenced perhaps by Nabokov's Ada) to read Soviet history via the trope of allegorical Americana. Arriving on Earth after the destruction of 'Krypton', Iosif Vissarionovich is brought to (political) maturity by Lenin, played by Kevin Costner (who, as he ages, looks more and more like the original). His 'true' name, Kal-el, is clearly a version of his affiliation, 'Karl (Marx)'; although he takes a mundane name 'Clark Kent' to disguise his revolutionary ambitions until the time is right. For many years this Man of Steel lives in hiding, working at a number of commendably proletarian jobs; the world is not ready for him. But finally the true danger of counterrevolutionary reaction reveals itself: the fourth-internationalist threat of General Leon Zodsky, backed by the imperialist aggression of the Capitalist West, represented in this movie by a ruthless female second-in-command, several other faceless warriors, and a large amount of 'Star Wars' era advanced weaponry. In a powerful if perhaps over-long scene, the battle for the soul of the world is waged across one symbolic city. This place, the generically-named 'Metropolis', is clearly a cinematic version of Stalingrad; and as the battle rages it is turned from a gleaming urbs to a mass of rubble: towers, railway stations, industrial zones, everything is smashed and crushed. That no Western city ever suffered so comprehensive a destruction leads, inevitably, to the conclusion that this dramatizes in fictional form the clash between Operation Barbarossa and Operation Uranus. Indeed, I watched this portion of the film with increasing astonishment at the sheer level of civilian casualties such a battle must have entailed. How great the cost, in human terms, is the repelling of invaders from the Motherland! -- and the enactment of revolution that brings the Man of Steel himself to the attention of the world!

The casting was mostly good: Henry Cavil has some of the heft and physical bulk of Iosif Vissarionovich, although he plays the role without facial hair (presumably he will wear a moustache in the sequel); Russell Crowe plays Marx again without facial hair, but the opening scenes, in which he warns of the impending collapse of Capitalism and is ignored, is true to life. Amy Adams plays Rosa Luxemburg rather humourlessly: she works (as Luxemburg did herself) for the newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza ("The Workers' Cause") but otherwise contributes little to the struggle against the imperialist running dogs.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time 4: At Lady Molly's (1957)

The conceit governing this short run of blogposts (that, in working through A Dance to the Music of Time I was reading a Peake-like High Fantasy novel) was always going to get tiresome, stretched across all twelve novels; and in fact At Lady Molly's strikes me as a good place to drop the gag. This is because this novel is the first in the series I've read during which I felt any kind of actual real-world connection. The effect here is less the disinterested fascination of a Gormenghastly world played out under my gaze, and something more recognisably like 20th-century Britain. Jenkins, the Powell-stand-in narrator, is working for the movies as a script writer and doctor; Hitler is in power in Germany and World War Two is brewing. Something about the way Powell treats all this shifts the timbre of the novel out of structured quasi-fabulation into something closer to life. It's a little hard to put my finger on what, mind.

I think it may have a good deal to do with the way Powell handles his roman à clef idiom. In the earlier books the fact that St John Clarke was a sour from-life portrait of John Galsworthy, or that Templar and Stringham were based on Powell's friends, did not intrude into the functioning of the novel. Because, to slip into the American vernacular, I could care less about John Galsworthy. But Erridge, Powell's portrait of George Orwell, is a different matter. This novel shows Orwell as a fool, a sort of Prince Mishkin (one character makes this comparison, actually) but without the redeeming spirituality. There's nothing remotely noble about Erridge's habit of leaving his stately home dressed as a tramp to sleep rough around the country. It's presented as eccentricity, marinaded in an uneasy guilt at his good birth and family money, iterated in practice through a preference for abstract ideals (Marxist ideals, presented by Powell as beyond ridiculous, in a not-even-wrong sort of way) over actual human interaction. Erridge is a dabbler, pottering at stiffly polemical journalism and pamphlets; ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, a dull twit. If Powell's portrait of him isn't exactly that he is actively contemptible, that's only because there's not enough substance in Erridge to merit any emotional reaction so feisty. It is certainly outwith the ability of this novel to imagine, even obliquely, that a rich man giving up his wealth could be anything other than absurd. There's nothing of Tolstoy, Gandhi, or even Wittgenstein about Erridge. And, the more I read, the more profoundly irritated I became by Powell's satirical certainty in this matter.

It's perfectly possible that Eric Blair was, in life, just as ridiculous, priggish, absent-minded, foolish and self-deluding as Powell presents him as being. He was, though, a genius; one of the very few actual geniuses of 20th-century English literature. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a towering novel, the sort of book that changes lives (it had a meteor-crash impact on my own early reading) on the individual but also the social level. Animal Farm is a classic; his personal accounts (The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out, the Catalonia book) are marvellous; a healthy chunk of his (wide-ranging) journalism and literary criticism is still vibrantly alive. But there is there none of this in Erridge as he appears in At Lady Molly's; and Powell's rendering of Blair as another one of his petty grotesques, like a less-comical Widmerpool, left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. The point is: Powell missed something not only central and crucial but elephant-in-room-ish about Blair when he turned him into Erridge. The novel misses not only Orwell's perhaps chilly, unforgiving dignity; more to the point it misses that the century about which Powell is writing belongs much more to Orwell's vision of things than it did to Powell's own well-mannered superannuated dix-huitième siècleisme. It doesn't dispose me to trust the rest of his fictionalised autobiography. And Eric/George = 'Erridge' is lazy pseudonymising.

This is a shame, because there's a lot to praise in this book.

Brian Aldiss, Finches of Mars (2013)

My review of what is (it seems) Brian Aldiss's last novel is over on the Guardian website. Aldiss is one of the figures the reading of whom inspired me to write SF, and some of his books are staggeringly good. Not this one, though. It's pants. Mind you, not everybody thinks so: SFX loves it.

Frank Swain, How To Make A Zombie (2013)

Arcfinity has my review of Swain's pop-sci book. It's a perfectly decent example of the form, although I give voice, over on the review, to a number of more-or-less grumpy thoughts about the larger idiom of books like this.

The success of books designed to popularise science (‘Main Title Namechecking Famous Scientific Thingummy: Subtitle Framed As A Question?’) is a contemporary cultural phenomenon of great interest. Hundreds of titles have been published, and a good number have gone on to become bestsellers. This has brought a degree of understanding of science and nature to a wide audience, and that can only be a good thing. The question, I suppose, is whether such books fall foul of Pope’s Law (a little learning being a dangerous thing). Another way of putting this might be to see all such books, up to and including Swain’s, as examples of the QI-ification of contemporary knowledge. ... But a love of nuggets of trivia is not the same thing as a love of learning more generally conceived. A single datum of trivia—a trivium—gives its possessor the satisfaction of knowing specialised, non-obvious things without requiring her to invest the labour and time in actual learning. It can be traded, in a cultural context: at a dinner party, say, or down the pub with friends, a trivium can be swapped for a small increase in the esteem of one’s companions and a lightening of the collective mood. In this respect, a trivium is akin to a joke, or a piece of gossip. And that’s fine and dandy—I like jokes, and value gossip. But trivia, gossip and anecdotes do not add up to Knowledge, because Knowledge requires the effort of systematic and engaged effort. Knowing a whole bunch of anecdotal trivia will tend to make us feel cleverer, or at least better informed, than we really are. The problem with a general QI-ification of contemporary knowledge is that it dissipates knowledge as such, and corrodes the more effortful disciplines of science. Humans are grievously prone to generalise dangerously on the basis of anecdotes and decontextualized trivia; adding more decontextualized trivia isn’t the way to address this.